Eating: Otherness

March 16 - April 29, 2023

Curated by Emily Alesandrini and Danni Shen

Artists
Destiny Belgrave
May Maylisa Cat
Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou
Jeanne F. Jalandoni
Hayoon Jay Lee
TJ Shin

In her seminal essay, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (1992), author and activist bell hooks writes: “The overriding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.” The artists in Eating: Otherness explore food, consumption and the body on their own terms, asserting an inedibility and agency beyond colonial definitions. Expanding on and sometimes reconfiguring various aesthetic traditions and popular representations of foodstuffs, the works in this exhibition take on critical, sociocultural investigations of food-related topics such as meal preparation, wellness culture, and culinary appropriation, while highlighting various forms of sustenance and their meaningful sources. At the heart of this project is also a celebration of food-centered relations via abundance, as well as of intergenerational, ancestral, and embodied knowledge. For artists of various diasporas in the city, food is especially situated among these convoluted factors, and it is at these junctures that works by Destiny Belgrave, May Maylisa Cat, Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, Hayoon Jay Lee, and TJ Shin intervene.

This project further acknowledges the homogenizing, white-supremacist history of the consumption of women’s bodies and labor, while simultaneously serving as a rebuttal to those forces that continue to infringe upon our diverse and specific relations to wellbeing, food security, and bodily autonomy. Eating: Otherness prompts us to reconsider both the notions of eating and otherness: Can what we consume, a recipe, cooking, or the rituals of a meal, also be a form of resistance and refusal? Can the diversity found in knowledge via food present radical other ways of being in the world?

In the spirit of EFA Project Space’s broader thematic program that seeks projects which bring audiences beyond contemporary art and gallery contexts, Eating: Otherness will host two interdisciplinary public programs in collaboration with New York-based, food justice-centered organizations, with the goal of deeper knowledge sharing and cross-pollination between various (including art) communities.

Food Justice & Art Open Dialogue with Educators Chantel Kemp and DK Kinard

Thursday, April 6, 6-7:30 PM

This online conversation is free and open to the public. This program will be recorded. RSVP HERE

Potluck, Artist Talk, & Catalog Launch

Thursday, April 20, 6-8 PM

In person at EFA Project Space
323 W 39th St, New York, NY 10018
Free and open to the public.

This event includes food and refreshments, as well as conversation with the curators and artists Destiny Belgrave, Jeanne Jalandoni, and Hayoon Jay Lee. Free and open to the public.

Earth Day Community Garden Tour and Snack with Marcia Denson

Saturday, April 22, 12-1 PM

On location at Phoenix Community Garden
RSVP Required as space is limited
2037 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11233
Free and open to the public.

This event is co-hosted with Phoenix Community Garden

The exhibition will also include a publication featuring a commissioned essay on food and Taiwanese-American identity entitled Lunch at Tunghai, by speculative food writer and researcher Suqi Karen Sims. Sims’s work at the intersections of food culture, myth, and nontraditional forms, has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Heated, and Put A Egg On It, among others. She is an assistant editor for the literary journal Five Points, where she writes on food and literature. As a freelance food writer, she has also written for Compass (a bilingual food magazine based in Taichung, Taiwan), Westchester Magazine, and Mashed. She runs the food blog @diningdecatur.